Laura Lippman - Every Secret Thing

“So you must have been. Only a popular person wouldn’t think about it.”

“It was just high school.”

“I didn’t get to go to high school. Not a real one. Although I got my diploma at Middlebrook.”

Suddenly Nancy knew what Alice wanted from her: pity. The girl actually expected sympathy, for missing high school and all the other normal rituals of adolescence.

“Well, Olivia Barnes didn’t get to go to high school either.”

Alice, chastised, bent her head so Nancy could not see her eyes when she whispered: “I know.”

“There’s another little girl missing, Alice.”

“I know.”

“How do you know?”

“I saw it on the news. My mom told me.”

“Which is it? You saw it on the news or your mom told you?”

“My mom told me and then I saw it on the news for myself, this morning.”

“She disappeared from Westview Mall. Is that one of the places you go, when you’re walking? It’s on Route 40.”

Her head was still down, her voice faint. “Yes.”

“Do you know anything? Anything at all about this missing little girl?”

“I know,” Alice said, “something I’m not supposed to know. But I know it because, because…I broke a rule.”

“A rule?”

“Well, more like an admonition.” Alice raised her head, as if surprised she knew this word and could use it.

“An admonition?”

“I think that’s right. I mean, it’s not a law, or a rule, it’s just something I was told I shouldn’t do. My mom and my lawyer, they said there were certain things I shouldn’t do. And I sorta did them.”

“What did you do, Alice?”

“I didn’t walk by the Barnes house,” she said. Interesting. Asked what she had done, the girl began by citing what she had not done. If she hadn’t walked by the Barnes house, would she even know there was a new little Barnes?

“There’s no reason for you to. Is there?”

“It’s in my neighborhood and it’s a pretty street. I used to walk up and down it all the time. But I don’t go there now.”

“Have you seen the Barnes family at all?”

“No.”

Her denial felt like the most honest thing she had said so far. Which meant that she would have no reason to grab a girl who looked like Rosalind Barnes. Nancy allowed herself a moment of despair. What if this were all a coincidence? What if Cynthia Barnes’s paranoia had set them off in the wrong direction? She tried to reassure herself that she and Infante had kept all their options open. A young detective from Family Crimes was trying to stay on top of the Social Services end of it, checking out the family more thoroughly. And this, sadly enough, was the only lead Nancy and Infante had developed in twenty-four hours. If Nancy hadn’t been interviewing Alice, she’d just be taking phone calls from helpful, helpless cranks, interviewing dimwitted mall employees, watching security tapes that showed nothing.

“So that’s what you didn’t do. What did you do? What”-she chose, quite deliberately, to echo Alice ’s word back to her-“admonition did you ignore?”

She whispered: “I saw Ronnie.”

“Ronnie Fuller?”

Alice nodded, her face stricken, as if she had confessed to something horrible.

“You saw Ronnie…” She left a space for Alice to finish the thought, but the girl didn’t jump in. “You saw Ronnie do what?”

Alice looked deflated, as if she had expected a more horrified reaction. “I just…saw her. I walked over to where she works and I watched her. She didn’t see me. But I’m not supposed to see her. Sharon said.”

Sharon who? Nancy let it pass. “So you saw her. When was this?”

A flash of impatience: “Yesterday. That’s what we’re talking about, right? Yesterday.”

“You were at the Bagel Barn yesterday?”

“I didn’t go in. I didn’t even get close. I just sat on the curb for a while. I could see Ronnie, but she didn’t see me.”

Alice seemed to have no sense of what she was doing. Yes, she was placing Ronnie at Westview Mall, a few hours before Brittany Little disappeared. But she was placing herself there, too.

“Did you see her do anything…unusual?”

“No. But I saw Ronnie. I thought you’d want to know she worked there. Did you?”

“Actually,” Nancy said, “we did.”

“Oh.” Alice looked confused. “I thought that’s why you came to see me. Because you knew I had seen Ronnie. I thought that’s why I was in trouble. I couldn’t imagine what else I might have done.”

“You can’t?”

The girl shook her head.

“ Alice -did you go into the mall yesterday?”

“No. I left because I didn’t want Ronnie to see me.”

“Why did you want to see Ronnie?”

“I didn’t want to see her. I just did.”

“By accident?”

“Sort of.”

“What do you mean, ‘sort of.’ It was an accident, or it wasn’t.”

“I knew from my mom that Ronnie had a job at the bagel place. But I didn’t know her hours, or what days she worked. So it’s not like I could have planned it.”

“But you went there hoping you might see her?”

Her eyes slid away from Nancy ’s. “Yes,” she said in a voice so soft that Nancy needed Alice ’s nodding head to confirm what she thought she had heard.

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know.” And then, almost to herself, as if castigating herself. “I thought you didn’t know about the bagel shop, that I could help you. I want to help. I’m trying to help.”

“You can help us,” Nancy said, “by telling the truth.”

Fierce, automatic: “I always tell the truth.”

“Then tell me this. Do you know anything about Brittany Little, the girl who disappeared? Anything at all, Alice?”

“I don’t know Brittany Little. I mean, except from the news. I saw her picture on the news.”

“Can I ask you something, Alice?”

Alice gave her an odd look, as if it were late in the game for Nancy to be seeking permission to ask questions. Still, she nodded.

“I mean, it’s only because it might give me-give us-an insight. When you took Olivia Barnes, what were you thinking?”

The wounded blue eyes cut right through her, saw the deception in Nancy ’s question. “How would that give you an insight? I mean, unless Ronnie or I did what happened. And I didn’t.”

“Still-” Nancy had to know. Even if it proved to have nothing to do with the matter at hand, she had to have the answer to the question that had haunted her for so many years. “What were you thinking?”

“We thought she had been abandoned. We thought we could take care of her until her parents came back.”

“And why did you kill her?”

“I didn’t,” Alice said with a weariness at once disappointed and resigned. “Ronnie did. I wasn’t even there when it happened.”

“I know that’s what you said back then. But you can tell the truth now. It’s over. There’s no risk now in telling me what happened.”

“I am telling the truth. I always told the truth. It’s not my fault that no one believed me. Ronnie’s a bad girl. You can’t know what she’ll do. It’s almost like there’s another girl who lives inside Ronnie and comes out sometimes. That’s why people want to believe Ronnie when she says she didn’t do things, because she doesn’t remember doing them, so she seems really honest. But she’s bad, really bad.”

“Are you saying she has, like, another personality?”

“Sort of?” Alice ’s voice was tentative. “I saw this show once, and there was a girl like that. Only with Ronnie, it’s not so…obvious, you know.”

“What do you mean?”

“Her voice doesn’t change, and she doesn’t tell you to call her by a different name. But it’s like there’s good Ronnie and bad Ronnie, and bad Ronnie will do anything, and then good Ronnie can’t believe she did it, so she’s believable when she says she doesn’t remember. I don’t know why she killed Olivia. If I had been there, maybe I could have stopped her. But I wasn’t. I wasn’t even there.”